The Students' Union and the politicians - Manchester Open Hive
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chap 9 23/9/03 1:18 pm Page 189
9
The Students’ Union and
the politicians
Student activists were not the revolutionaries of the 1980s, the bearers
or prophets of a new order; instead they seemed fated to be rebels,
protesting against changes imposed from on high. The initiative had
passed to a neoliberal, sink-or-swim, roll-back-the-State Government
which nevertheless contrived to interfere with universities as none of
its predecessors had ever done. It appeared to be starving students
of public money, ostensibly in an effort to make them more self-reliant
(some Labour MPs remarked that the effect of the State’s parsimony
was to make students stand on their parents’ feet rather than their own,
and lean on their banks for overdrafts). Students could only react to
Government assaults on privileges which they had once regarded as
rights, and dream of restoring a vanished golden age. Individually,
students suffered from deteriorating services, grants and benefits.
Collectively, they – or their elected officers – faced attacks on the
autonomy of student unions, measures designed to subject them to
tighter control by the administrators of their own universities.
In the early 1970s students had feared with good reason that Edward
Heath’s Government, suspicious of union officers’ liking for left-wing
political causes, might introduce such arrangements. Conservative
politicians, however, had not had time, and their Labour successors
had made no move, to do so. But in February 1980 Mark Carlisle
announced the abandonment of the old system of union finance, which
had depended on a subscription negotiated by the union with the
university and paid, on the university’s recommendation, by the local
authorities. Henceforth the unions would be financed from the univer-
sities’ block grants, which would be suitably adjusted. This reform
would, or so the Government imagined, persuade university authorities
to keep a tighter grip on union expenditure: should this get out of hand,
it would begin to vie with the many academic activities making claims
on the university purse. Students would now be asking for university
money, rather than collaborating with the university to obtain local
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190 The 1980s
authority funding; the union would become a university department,
rather than a separate entity applying with the university’s backing for
funds from a different source.
At first the AUT were as apprehensive as the students. Laurie Sap-
per, their General Secretary, denounced the proposals as ‘the height of
madness, sowing the seeds of disruption in each and every university’.
Indeed, at a meeting in the University of Manchester, he warned his
members to look to their claims for promotion and pay, which might
well be jeopardised by having another competitor for university
funds, a rival which made a ‘totally dissimilar call’ upon them. Inter-
viewed by a Manchester student journalist, Mark Carlisle explained
that the Public Accounts Committee had thought the old system too
open-ended. The advantage of the new order was that unions would
have to plead for their money ‘at local level’ and justify their use of
this year’s grant if they wanted a similar allowance next year. His
junior colleague, Rhodes Boyson, argued that to insist on account-
ability was not to dictate policy; the arrangements were not as illiberal
as they seemed.
Although Mancunion complained that students’ unions in general
were being treated like ‘church hall youth clubs’, the University
showed no signs of reverting to the paternalism of the 1960s and again
concerning itself with such matters as the libellous contents of the
Union newspaper or the immoral presence of contraceptive dispensers
in the Union building. Union finance did not in practice present the
serious problems which pessimists had foreseen, and, despite the cuts,
the Union did not approach insolvency, as it had done in the 1970s.
Much was due to the wise counsel of the Union manager, Vic Silcock,
who was appointed in the early 1980s: as David Richardson remem-
bers, he ‘combined infinite patience, strong left-wing conviction and
sound business sense, and became a much respected and valued confi-
dant to successive Union executives’.
Two issues, however, did prove both delicate and controversial. The
new arrangements imposed on the University itself a duty to ensure
that the Union observed charity law and did not use public money for
purposes not relevant to the well being of students, including political
campaigns and demonstrations. ‘I do not see it as the role of university
students’, said Mark Carlisle, ‘to get involved in matters outside the
university.’ Furthermore, as a result of events during the 1980s, in
Manchester and elsewhere, universities incurred a legal obligation to
guarantee free speech within the law: they would have to ensure that
controversial speakers at union meetings obtained a hearing and were
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 191
not shouted down for expressing views which conflicted with union
policy. As controllers of the purse, universities would have power to
fine or withhold funds from unions deemed guilty of misconduct or of
damaging university premises, and Whitehall might well press them
to discipline students who had assaulted or silenced unpopular politi-
cians. The University never attempted to fine the Union collectively,
but did take disciplinary proceedings against four of its members in
1986 amid much turbulence and some angry complaints that the Uni-
versity was violating the independence of the Union.
Between 1982 and 1985 the University made over to the Union a
sum of between £520,000 and £570,000 annually, allowing between
£45 and £52 per student. Since the Government permitted students’
unions level funding in 1981–82, the University eventually subjected
the Union to the average cut of 13 per cent suffered by faculties and
departments, but did so in two stages rather than three, reducing their
funds by 8 per cent in 1982–83 and 5 per cent the following year.
Responsibility for paying its own electricity bill passed gradually to
the Union. In January 1983 the General Secretary, Andy Whyte,
vowed that the Union would declare none of its staff redundant and
that, unlike the University, it would honour nationally agreed wage
settlements. Allowances to societies and funding for campaigns would
increase, but less would be spent on social get-togethers and other
events, on exchange visits with students’ unions in Poland, and on
repairs and maintenance. Student spending power would very likely
fall in the immediate future and take the Union’s trading income with
it; the outlook appeared to be bleak.
However, at least one student urged the Union to stop complaining
about cuts and realise its own economic power: it had substantial
assets and a large capacity for borrowing. The Union did not follow
the suggestion that it should acquire its own houses and flats or even
purchase a block in Hulme, but, with Mr Silcock’s help, it did man-
age its affairs well and did not allow its premises to decay. The place
received a thorough facelift in the summer of 1983, when attempts
were made to banish the ‘school dining room look’ of the Coffee Bar
and to tart up the discotheque in the Cellar Bar. Jo White, the new
General Secretary, called it ‘the largest, most hectic and most success-
ful refurbishment programme the Union has ever seen’. Since it
promised to boost the Union’s trading income by making the building
less depressing, the redecoration was probably a sound investment.
Cramped conditions had been a grievance for twenty years, and
after the demolition of The Squat in 1982 plans to find the Union extra
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192 The 1980s
room in far-flung places came to nothing. But early in 1985 the Union
realised that it might soon have the means to build on the adjacent plot
which had long been reserved for its eventual use. For the officers had,
Mancunion reported, ‘uncovered’ a large sum in a Capital Reserve
Fund, dedicated to the sole purpose of building an extension. The joint
signatures of the Union Manager and the University’s Director of
Finance would be able to authorise the use of the money. It would not
cover the entire cost of a high-tech building, which was estimated at
‘£379,000 net of furniture and fittings’. But the University was always
on the look-out for more space in which to hold examinations and if
the Union built a large auditorium it could be used occasionally for that
purpose. Hence the University agreed to give some help, and Council
to approve the arrangements, on the understanding that the Union
would commit the entire Reserve Fund, expected to amount to about
£230,000 by the summer, to the enterprise.
Optimists dreamed of completing a new building within two years.
However, excavations began only in the autumn of 1989. By that time
the estimated cost had risen to a little over £1m., but the project went
ahead and the Union acquired a profitable night club. In a statement,
‘12 Things You Never Knew About Your Union’, made at the time of
the elections of 1990, the Union claimed that although the real value
of their share in the block grant had fallen since 1981 by 40 per cent,
they were making a surplus every year and adding it to their ‘reserves
for long-term planning. It is only thanks to these reserves that we can
afford the new building. THE UNIVERSITY IS NOT PAYING FOR
THIS NEW BUILDING. THE UNION IS.’ Council minutes of 1988
and 1989 congratulated the Union on good financial management –
in the year ending on 3 July 1988 the operating surplus had reached
about £102,000, leaving a net surplus of £7,000 after transfer to
reserves. The Union’s policy was to offer good service and expect cus-
tomers to pay for it: ‘We can’t be as cheap as some places because we
don’t cut corners and we pay decent wages.’
Much had been made for many years of the contest for money and
attention within the Union between campaigns and services: left-wing
students emphasised the first, Conservatives the second. In certain
periods, especially in 1982–83, Mancunion published more stories
about national or regional demonstrations, marches and rallies
involving a few Manchester students, than about the internal affairs
of the University. This did not mean, however, that the Union was
spending vast sums on such activities. When Conservative ministers
eventually commissioned a survey of seventy-one students’ unions in
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 193
1989, they found that none spent more than 2 per cent of its income
on supporting political groups and that about two-thirds spent less
than 0.5 per cent. Arguably, though, proof of any such expenditure
would lay a union open to charges of improper conduct and invite the
University to move in and curb it.
In the autumn of 1983 Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney-General,
sent to all universities, polytechnics and colleges a letter for transmission
to their students’ unions. This stated the view that it was improper to
employ union funds to support or oppose political parties or promote
campaigns on issues that did not affect students as students – for exam-
ple, to press for illegal drugs to be made lawful. Nor should students
call upon union funds to back one side or the other in industrial dis-
putes, by hiring coaches to carry them to demonstrations or picket lines,
or by any other means. Expenditure was legitimate only for ‘the purpose
of representing and furthering the interests of students, for example by
providing channels for the representation of student views within the
college or by improving the conditions of life of the students and in par-
ticular providing facilities for their social and physical well-being’. There
was a difference between the interests of students and the causes that
some students were interested in. As parent bodies allocating funds for
‘charitable educational purposes’, college authorities must ensure that
these moneys were being properly applied. On being informed of ‘major
items of improper expenditure’, they should ‘cease to fund the union
until the position has been rectified’.
Jo White, the General Secretary, denounced the Attorney-General’s
letter as ‘an attempt by the Government to muzzle the students’ unions
as one of the most articulate and coherent sources of opposition to its
policies’. Another student took issue with her and called it unreason-
able to expect the country to foot the bill for ‘non-educational political
activities’. After all, the law was not just aimed at left-wing causes, and
also restrained the unions from funding such organisations as the
National Front, the Conservative Party and the Paedophile Information
Exchange.
Not content with expressions of indignation, the Union Executive
set out to establish a separate private limited company, Materialise
Ltd., to handle the Union’s profits from games machines and the
hiring-out of sun beds (the idea came from the Union manager). The
Union as a body would be shareholders in this enterprise, and the
Executive would be the directors, while the company’s articles of
association would entrust it with the task of providing the Union with
transport and other financial support for ‘non-educational political
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194 The 1980s
campaigns’. It would also be possible to run benefit discos for the
purpose of funding CND demonstrations and other such activities.
Some students, interested in defiance rather than fancy footwork, saw
Materialise Ltd. as a capitulation to the Government and a ‘tool of
the capitalist machine’. But it seemed a promising device, an alterna-
tive to expensive and probably futile campaigns for the defence of
Union autonomy. The University Council agreed that the Union’s
auditors should be commissioned ‘at the expense of the University if
necessary, to report and certify that no payments had been made from
charitable funds ultra vires’.
Dislike of Thatcherism was widespread, though not universal,
among students. When the Left Alliance made great gains in the Exec-
utive elections of 1983, an Economics postgraduate described it as ‘an
unholy alliance of Libs, SDP, carved-out Labour people and general
well-meaning middle/upper-class charitable-minded students who I
feel don’t like Thatcher, don’t like the Labour Left, don’t understand
the Union or the political system . . . ’. Strong student sentiment
opposed the Government for its policies, not only on education, but
also on defence and policing. Many students sympathised with work-
ers who resisted the Government, first with the health workers and
then, even more strongly, with the miners. They were anxious to help
them with deeds as well as words, and some students were involved
both with industrial picketing and with CND demonstrations. A few
suffered or witnessed arrests and complained of aggressive police tac-
tics, random snatches, confused evidence in magistrates’ courts, and
biased media reporting designed to praise police heroism in the face
of ‘mob violence’.
If students were brought before the courts, would the Union be
entitled to pay their fines and legal costs? Between 1983 and 1985
students were arrested, one or two of them several times, on the
picket lines of the National Graphical Association at The Stockport
Messenger’s plant in Warrington; during a CND demonstration at
Burtonwood, where a military air base was believed to be ‘one of the
United States’s major storage depots for its nuclear arsenal in Britain’;
and on a picket line at Kirkless Colliery, near Wigan. When magis-
trates fined one student £40 with £25 costs, the Union agreed to pay
the costs, whilst the money for the fine came from a CND benefit
disco and a benefit performance of Steven Berkoff ’s fringe play
Decadence at Owens Park.
Greater uncertainty surrounded the Union’s support for the miners
during the prolonged and bitter strike against pit closures which
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 195
began on 7 March 1984. In the spring term of that year the Union
adopted a policy on human rights which included a clause pledging it
in general terms to support the ‘struggle’ of all workers. On 1 May
this was put to a specific test, when a branch of the National Union of
Miners (NUM) at Bold Colliery asked the Union Executive to arrange
accommodation for secondary pickets, who were miners from York-
shire and Northumberland. One account suggested that the original
request referred to 500 miners and the Union decided that they could
cope with 100. Should they put them up in the Union building? Julian
Sampson, the Education Officer, a Conservative member of the Union
Executive, opposed the idea, arguing that hitherto ‘support’ had
meant nothing more than sending sympathetic telegrams or allowing
some use of office facilities to those supported. To offer accommoda-
tion to ‘flying pickets engaged in a highly politicised industrial dis-
pute’ would fly in the face of the Attorney-General’s letter; the
Union’s trading company, Materialise Ltd., could not lawfully pay,
because its object was to enable students to attend demonstrations,
not to give direct assistance to members of the public who were not
students. ‘Even if there were no expenditure involved, money in kind
would have been provided in a building set up by public funds.’ By
virtue of the Trust agreement of 1963, the University had the power
to prevent the use of the building for any purpose ‘which in the opin-
ion of the University Council shall be deemed of such a character as
to injure or cause discredit to the University’.
Unbidden, Julian Sampson consulted the Registrar, who apparently
told him that, having taken soundings, he thought that Council might
intervene and fine the Union for misusing the building. The Executive
decided to compromise by agreeing to put up the miners, not on
Union premises, but in the houses of student volunteers. Jo White,
the General Secretary, doubted the wisdom of challenging the Uni-
versity authorities in the summer term, the worst possible time to gal-
vanise members, because most undergraduates would be obsessed
with revision and preoccupied with exams. Although the miners had
received practical help, some political posturing followed and the
Executive stood accused of timidity in missing an opportunity to take
on the University, the Attorney-General and other members of the
Establishment, and in backing down at the instigation of a Conserva-
tive officer. They could reasonably claim, however, to have had no
authority from any General Meeting to accommodate trade unionists
on Union premises, and no time to summon a General Meeting to
settle the matter.
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196 The 1980s
On 10 October 1984 a General Meeting pledged more specific
support to the striking miners. The Union undertook to support all
miners’ initiatives; to make its own publishing facilities and a minibus
available to local NUM branches and Miners’ Support Groups; to
form a Miners’ Solidarity Society to give support within the Univer-
sity; and to purchase at cost price 7,000 copies of The Miner (the
NUM bulletin), distributing them with Mancunion so long as the dis-
pute continued. It was the last of these measures that appeared to
overstep the mark, and probably accounted for an item of about £700
in the Union accounts which the University auditors chose to query. It
seemed possible that the University might withhold the sum – equiva-
lent to about 0.13 per cent of the Union’s grant – from the Union’s
allowance for 1985–86; but nothing more was heard of the matter,
and no furore broke out. When the Union Council proposed to donate
£1,300 to the NUM from a ‘now defunct rent strike fund’, a student
objected on the different grounds that there were other causes, such as
famine relief in Ethiopia, whose claims were equally strong. Much of
the money for the Union’s Miners’ Support group, which ‘adopted’
Parkside Colliery at St Helens, came from daily collections taken at the
University and weekly collections taken at Piccadilly Station.
Sharper conflict between the Union and the University eventually
arose from the policy of ‘No Platform for Racists and Fascists’ which
had originated with the NUS in the 1970s and exercised a strong
influence over the Union. Many students had criticised its loose ter-
minology and the practice of applying it only to movements of the
Right, whereas in their view Marxist ideologies were equally inclined
to totalitarianism, and the ‘Fascism of the Left’ was as much to be
feared. In debate, some students argued that tyranny was a perversion
of Marxism, but essential to Fascism, and so the discriminate treat-
ment of the conflicting ideologies could be justified. As John O’Farrell
wrote in his account of eighteen miserable years as a Labour sup-
porter, the great Voltairean principle of free speech was giving way to
another – ‘I don’t agree with what you say, and you can’t say it
because you’re a Fascist’. In 1981 Geoff Glover, a member of the
Union Executive, felt moved to explain a fundamental difference
between Conservatism and Fascism: Conservatism had nothing to do
with making the State ‘the be-all and end-all of human existence’ but
wanted to shrink it and emphasise the principle of individual liberty.
He warned of the violent, intimidating language used by the Left –
‘the Tories must be smashed’, ‘Big Business must be destroyed’, ‘the
Fascists must be kicked off the streets’ (possibly with the aid of the
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 197
Doctor Marten boots favoured, at least in cartoons, by members of
the Socialist Workers Students Party). In future, however, many stu-
dents would associate the Government with heavy-handed policing,
‘racist’ immigration policies and the suppression of dissent; they
would find it hard to perceive the Conservatives as a party of liberty.
The supportive State might be withering away, but the oppressive
State was gathering strength.
There was a risk that the Union would close its ears to speakers who
challenged its agreed policies and lose the opportunity of refuting in
public debate any arguments which it disliked. The dilemma was
whether to wait for speakers to make inflammatory remarks, rule
these out of order and prosecute the offenders under the Race Rela-
tions and Public Order Acts, or whether to disqualify the speakers in
advance on the grounds of the opinions they were believed to hold or
their membership of proscribed organisations. If the Union Executive
gave a platform to an unpopular speaker, were members of the audi-
ence entitled to seize the initiative and disrupt the meeting? The Exec-
utive occasionally employed other forms of censorship by denying
certain organisations the right to distribute literature or make presen-
tations on Union premises; it accorded such treatment not only to the
Reunification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies, but also to
the Central Council for British Naturism, not because nudism was
tyrannical, but rather on the grounds that the organisation’s literature
was sexist and homophobic. Disapproval of such tactics was not con-
fined to politicians of the Right. When David Owen, the leader of the
Social Democratic Party (SDP), visited the Union in October 1985, he
called the ‘No Platform’ policy an erosion of democracy. Should
twenty people wish to start a National Front Society in the Union they
should be allowed to do so, for it was better to see these faces ‘out in
the open’ and allow debate to take place.
Between November 1983 and November 1985 the visits of three
Ministers of the Crown to the Students’ Union gave rise to scenes of
public disorder which were widely reported in the media, much to the
University’s discomfort. At the heart of the disturbances were Michael
Heseltine, the Defence Secretary; Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary;
and David Waddington, the Minister of State at the Home Office.
Some commentators believed that the visitors (or their hosts, the Con-
servative societies) were bent on provocation: that their aim was to
force the issue of free speech in university unions, and to manoeuvre
supporters of the Far Left into committing acts of ritual hooliganism
before the cameras in such a way as to discredit all students in the
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198 The 1980s
public eye. Heseltine and Brittan, or their advisers, insisted on facing
demonstrators at the front of the Union building rather than entering
discreetly by a side door. Heseltine’s visit coincided with the installa-
tion of American Cruise missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire
and at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire; Brittan’s with the final col-
lapse of the miners’ strike. Waddington was held responsible for
‘racist’ immigration controls and heartless deportations of visitors to
the country.
There were both similarities and contrasts between the three visits
and the actions which ensued, and the events doubtless influenced
each other. One theory held that the failure of the police to protect
Heseltine put them on their mettle and accounted for their brutal
efforts to ensure Brittan a safe passage into the Union building. After
Heseltine’s visit the University blamed outsiders, rather than its own
students, for the worst disturbances on the Union steps and in the
Debating Hall. In the wake of Brittan, numerous public order offences
allegedly committed outside the Union came before the magistrates’
courts, and many questions arose about the conduct of the police and
the University’s duty to protect its students from persecution at the
hands of maverick officers. In the Waddington case, disorder arose
only within the Union building and the police were little involved, the
magistrates not at all, whilst only Manchester students were blamed.
For the first time, too, the University censured the Union Executive
and, considering their discipline too feeble, set up its own tribunal –
a move construed as an attack on the Union even by students who did
not sympathise with the tactics of the accused.
Michael Heseltine’s hosts, the Federation of Conservative Students,
gave short notice of his impending visit and only divulged the news
the day before his arrival. In the time available the Union officers has-
tened to appoint stewards for the meeting and to hire a security firm
to control the entrances to the Main Debating Hall; if they had little
time to prepare, it was also true that the opposition to the Minister
had little time to organise. According to the account which the Vice-
Chancellor later gave to the University Council, Mr Heseltine and his
escort, approaching the Union building at midday on 15 November
1983, passed through a crowd of between fifty and eighty persons,
some hostile and others encouraging. Then ‘a man in the second rank
of the crowd squeezed a plastic bottle full of thinned paint and
directed the jet towards the Minister. The red paint hit him on the
forehead and, as he turned away, on the back of his head.’ The
assailant disappeared into the crowd and his victim was hastily taken
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 199
to the barber’s shop in the Union to be cleaned up and enabled to face
his audience with dignity. A group of twenty or thirty persons, hell-
bent on disruption, forced their way into the Main Debating Hall.
Despite their efforts the Minister succeeded in holding forth for about
twelve minutes. Mancunion reported that he spoke of the ‘most pre-
cious asset of university life – the freedom to speak and say what you
want’, and rebuked hecklers with, ‘If the only intellectual contribu-
tion you can make to this debate is to shout, at the top of your voice,
inarticulate and irrational abuse, then the British democracy will
judge you for what you are.’
Two student journalists provided, under the headline ‘HASSLETIME
REVISITED’, a dispassionate analysis of media treatment of the event.
It was hardly surprising that neither The Sun (which screamed of an
‘AMAZING GAUNTLET OF HATE’) nor The Daily Telegraph should
have a good word for the crowds, while television crews, focusing on
a small group of troublemakers, presented students as hooligans. Even
the more liberal papers underplayed the student CND’s opposition to
violence. For this the CND subsequently apologised to the Minister,
although they denied having caused the disturbances themselves.
Advocates of discipline and punishment pointed out that the
University of Warwick had recently fined its Students’ Union £30,000
(equivalent to about 10 per cent of the Union’s grant) for its part in
recent demonstrations against Sir Keith Joseph, who had taken lunch
on the campus. But the situations in Warwick and Manchester could
hardly be compared, for at Warwick a Union General Meeting had
itself organised a would-be peaceful demonstration and the Union
had failed to control it or prevent damage to University premises. At
Manchester the Vice-Chancellor and Council found no evidence to
convict their own students of affray; anyone could walk on to the
Union steps from Oxford Road, the paint-sprayer had escaped, and
the foul-mouthed invaders of the Debating Hall had not been carry-
ing student identity cards. Leaders of the student CND blamed Social-
ist Workers and Revolutionary Communists for the upheavals;
student Socialist Workers were not displeased by the accusation, but
made no moves to own up. The University was not moved to rebuke
the Union officers, but could only acknowledge the harm which such
incidents could inflict on the reputation, not only of Manchester, but
of all universities. Council therefore set up a ‘liaison group to oversee
security arrangements for future visits to the University by persons in
the public eye’; these measures had become too important to be left
to the Union alone.
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200 The 1980s
Some correspondents blamed the Union paper for publishing
bowdlerised reports of the Heseltine affair which said nothing about
police brutality towards demonstrators. This soon became a crucial
issue, for events surrounding the visit of the Home Secretary sixteen
months later earned the name ‘Battle of Brittan’, in memory of a
violent encounter between police officers and a crowd trapped on the
Union steps. On this occasion the student officers were well warned
of the Home Secretary’s impending visit and had ample time to
discuss arrangements with the police. However, according to the left-
wing journalist Martin Walker, they made a tactical error by agreeing
that the steps of the Union building should be regarded, just for the
night of Brittan’s visit, as a public highway. ‘In terms of public order
law and police authority, they had just ceded their right to lawfully
demonstrate on their own private property.’
A later report described how a good-humoured body of demonstra-
tors and spectators assembled on the Union steps and surrounding
pavements on the early evening of 1 March 1985, and the police made
no attempt to stop them from so doing. ‘The matters of concern for
the protesters ranged from VAT on tampons, to immigration controls,
and the policing of the miners’ strike.’ A banner exhorting ‘SUPPORT
THE MINERS ONE YEAR ON’ topped the entrance to the building.
Suddenly, a column of between twenty and forty police officers,
marching in pairs, emerged from Dover Street and, without uttering
any warning or calling upon the demonstrators to disperse, proceeded
with the aid of reinforcements to clear the steps by driving a wedge
into the crowd. Compressed into a narrow space, partly because
Union security staff had closed the doors of the building, the crowd
could only shove back. Pressure against the side railings was so hard
that one of these snapped and several demonstrators fell on to bicycles
parked six feet below.
One view of the incident was that the police involved, who were
drawn from a paramilitary force known as the Tactical Aid Group,
applied their training in riot control although they had no riot to con-
tend with, and set out to occupy the Union building and its sur-
roundings in the manner of a besieging army. Sinister significance was
attached to a plan of the area chalked on a blackboard at Longsight
police station, which a freelance photographer spotted and snapped
through an open window. This diagram suggested to suspicious minds
that the police had planned their assault in advance, regardless of the
size or mood of any demonstration they might encounter. Rejecting
the insinuation, the police report on the affair, published more than
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 201
three years later, was to blame incompetence rather than confess to
conspiracy: the police had planned a ‘low-key’ operation despite evi-
dence that a large demonstration was likely, and arrived with no loud-
hailer. Whatever the truth of the matter, the violence which occurred
both before the Home Secretary’s arrival and after his departure
injured about forty people and resulted in forty arrests. Thirty-three
persons were subsequently charged with public order offences,
though only three were accused of assault, and only two of them were
convicted: an outcome which suggested that it was not the crowd that
resorted to rough tactics.
The Home Secretary arrived and police officers escorted him into
the building with an elaborate show of force. Six members of the
Executive had met and decided by majority vote, despite concern for
the safety of Union members and staff, to let the meeting proceed. It
proved to be hot-tempered and disorderly, inflamed by the events out-
side, but the officers of the Union could claim to have upheld Mr Brit-
tan’s right to free speech as far as they were able. Many of the
audience had intended to demonstrate silently by turning their backs
on the speaker, but now changed their tactics and voiced angry
protests against the behaviour of the police. In the words of Mancu-
nion, the Home Secretary’s speech on law and order degenerated into
an ‘improvised rant’. He was disconcerted only by a question ‘from
one Jew to another’ demanding why the police had to use excessive
force. Otherwise he replied in kind to the protesters, saying, ‘You’re
not worthy of your educational privileges’, and (according to The
Manchester Evening News) calling them ‘rent-a-crowd, cowardly bul-
lies, yobboes, a bunch of lunatics and fascist cheer-leaders guilty of the
worst kind of intellectual hypocrisy’. A medical student wrote: ‘How
I would have loved to see this unpleasant man embarrassed, not by
constant abusive heckling, but by constructive questioning on his
racist policies, on his policing tactics, etc.’
As with the Heseltine affair, some public and media reactions were
hostile. Even the THES spoke of ‘infantile Scargillism among some
students’ and warned of its consequences: ‘Not only do such out-
breaks, which of course make perfect primetime television, give higher
education a bad name with the public, but they are widely interpreted
as proof of the inability of universities, polytechnics and colleges to
manage their own affairs with reasonable discipline.’ But a mother
wrote to The Guardian in support of her daughter, a pacifist, aged
nineteen, whom she had seen on the nine o’clock news emerging
backwards at the bottom of the Union steps ‘from under the feet of
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202 The 1980s
dozens of charging policemen’. She added that ‘contrary to what the
media would have us believe, the police now bring serious trouble
whenever they descend en masse’. Attention began to shift from stu-
dent disorder to police misconduct, and in the series of inquests which
followed the BBC played a prominent part.
Within a few days a general meeting of students packed the Whit-
worth Hall and censured four Union officers for having the doors of
the building closed when the police wheeled into the crowd and for
allowing Brittan to speak in the wake of police violence. At the request
of James Anderton, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, the
Somerset and Avon Constabulary embarked on a prolonged investiga-
tion which proceeded under the umbrella of the newly-established
Police Complaints Authority; a full summary of its long-delayed report
was to appear only in 1988, some three-and-a-half years after the
events of 1 March 1985. This document would admit to peccadilloes,
but not to iniquities or conspiracies, on the part of the police. Sceptics
distrusted any inquiry which involved the police investigating the
police and objected to the University’s decision to allow the investiga-
tors a room in St Peter’s House, as well as to the chummy relations
which apparently existed between the two forces, the judges and the
judged. But the Home Secretary rejected pleas for an independent tri-
bunal. In an effort to create one, the City Council’s Police Monitoring
Committee, whose aim was to insist that the police be accountable to
the people, set up an unofficial inquiry of their own under the chair-
manship of John Platts-Mills, a left-wing Queen’s Counsel and peace
campaigner who had proved too radical for the Labour Party.
Both the police and the Platts-Mills inquiries disposed of incom-
plete evidence, in that no police officer would talk to the City’s
investigators, and the Students’ Union refused to co-operate with the
police inquiry. Individual students spoke to the police and at least one
came to regret it, but many others distrusted them, not only in prin-
ciple but also from a fear that evidence given to the police might be
disclosed to prosecutors in the magistrates’ courts. At trials held in
April and May 1985, nineteen defendants were convicted (some con-
victions were later quashed on appeal) and fourteen were found not
guilty, partly as a result of confused and inaccurate police evidence.
Having received 102 eye-witness statements, representing one-fifth
to one-quarter of the crowd which had awaited Brittan, the Platts-
Mills panel reported in November 1985 that virtually all of them had
testified to aggressive and violent policing, while forty-eight witnesses
claimed to have been assaulted by police officers. ‘In our view, the
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 203
failure to give the demonstrators an opportunity peacefully to move
from the steps was unreasonable, unjustifiable, and, in the circum-
stances, highly irresponsible.’ The BBC screened a programme, ‘A Fair
Degree of Force’, in a series called Brass Tacks, to coincide with the
publication of the report. The makers focused on violent police action
at essentially peaceful gatherings, not only in Manchester but also at
Orgreave coking plant and at Stonehenge.
Platts-Mills and his colleagues took seriously some alarming reports
of the persecution of two Manchester students who were believed to
be in possession of evidence against police officers and well placed
to complain of them. One was Sarah Hollis, a third-year medical
student; the other, Steven Shaw, who was in his final year, reading Pol-
itics and Philosophy, and writing a thesis on police technology under
the supervision of Roger Williams, the Professor of Science and Tech-
nology Policy. Both told appalling stories, not only of being trailed and
threatened with unlawful arrest by men who appeared to be plain-
clothes policemen, but also of having their homes burgled, as though
to relieve them of incriminating documents. Steven Shaw claimed
to have had his thesis stolen, to have been strip-searched for drugs in
Bootle Street police station, and to have been assaulted and burned
with cigarettes on the cheekbone during a return visit to Manchester
in January 1986 some months after graduating. The police inquiry
appeared to have no interest in investigating these allegations and
to prefer to turn on the people who had made them, for it found no
corroboration of Sarah Hollis’s statements, questioned her integrity,
and went so far as to recommend that Steven Shaw be prosecuted for
attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Academics, particularly elected members of Senate, were horrified
by the reports and strove, together with the Union officers, to bring the
matter at intervals before the Senate and the Assembly and to press the
police to publish their report without further delay. They were anxious
that the University should take action to protect its students, and grew
impatient with the non-committal attitude adopted, at least in public,
by the University administration. More than a year after the Battle of
Brittan, the plight of the two students influenced the election of the
new Chancellor, in which victory went to the distinguished lawyer
John Griffith, in the summer of 1986. An article in The Guardian
reported that ‘Many students and staff were already disappointed by
the ostrich-like position of the authorities over Hollis and Shaw’ and
described Griffith as ‘a man with a sterling record on civil liberties,
who might be expected to take an interest in the unlucky two’.
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204 The 1980s
Sarah Hollis’s case was all the more poignant because her natural
instinct was to refute indiscriminate attacks on the police; a clergy-
man’s daughter, she had, she once said, grown up in a quiet part of
Suffolk where citizens trusted them. She had criticised in a letter to
Mancunion the provocative behaviour of student activists who had got
themselves arrested in a demonstration in Manchester on 23 Novem-
ber 1984 against the erosion of the student grant – ‘I do not say I con-
done any police violence which occurred on Friday, but I do say that
the whole incident could and should have been avoided.’ Injured after
the Home Secretary’s departure on 1 March 1985, she became the
subject of a famous news photograph which showed her lying uncon-
scious at the foot of the Union steps with senior police officers kneel-
ing at her side. The Daily Mail published the picture with the caption
‘Police Aid Demo Girl’ as evidence of police chivalry and compassion
(this was misleading, at least in the sense that she was not a demon-
strator, but was present as a member of the Union Council and had
been helping to issue tickets for the meeting). Sarah Hollis objected to
the tone of a book on the Brittan affair by Martin Walker, who had
already written, or collaborated in, two books about the miners’
strike. Though favourable to her personally, Walker advanced argu-
ments which she could not accept, for he depicted the ‘paramilitary
police’ as supporters of the State against the people and as hostile, by
virtue of their ‘right wing lumpen ideology’, to students in general and
socialist students in particular. ‘Students’, he wrote, ‘are a good anvil
for the hammer of this new order; by their very nature they do not
appear to produce and the liberal structure of the institution of learn-
ing allows them to develop life-styles which are different. And if it is
the case that they do not much feel like causing trouble, then trouble
can be thrust on them.’ Disliking such insinuations, Sarah Hollis
thought the title of the book, With Extreme Prejudice, all too reveal-
ing of its own assumptions. ‘I am saddened that he should use my story
to perpetuate and accentuate the chasm of mistrust and misunder-
standing which exists between the police and many of the public.’
But she had her own, more specific, complaints. She had lost all
faith in the police inquiry and reported that Deputy Chief Constable
Reddington of the Somerset and Avon Constabulary had asked her
‘why they should believe me when I was publicly ambitious in the Stu-
dents’ Union (I was a member of Amnesty International and CND,
and Grant and Welfare Secretary of the Union)’. She complained that
an interim report produced by the inquiry had identified eight cases
of assault by policemen, but held no senior officers responsible for the
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 205
operation which had gone disastrously wrong. Eventually, in 1991,
when a qualified doctor, she lost a civil action against Greater Man-
chester Police in the High Court: several police officers maintained
that she had accidentally tumbled down the Union steps, and the
judge did not accept her claim that a policeman had caused her fall.
Steven Shaw, however, was happy to endorse Martin Walker’s
book. Friends and supporters launched a ‘Justice for Steven Shaw’
campaign in May 1986. He left the country the following autumn to
escape prosecution and the danger of further harassment. He became
a hero and a martyr for students fearful of an incipient police state
devoted to crushing dissent and determined to retaliate against any-
one who complained. Some were anxious to create monuments to
him and to the Battle of Brittan, for student folk-memory was notori-
ously short, and the next cohort would probably forget both the man
and the event. In the words of a ballad published in Mancunion in
March 1987:
‘It’s a few bad apples’, the Liberals cry,
‘The British Police’s standards are high.’
Go over to Ireland, ask dead children’s mums,
Ask Cherry Groce about police use of guns,
Ask them in Brixton, in Handsworth, Moss Side,
Ask Wapping pickets if Steven Shaw lied.
When the statutes come in and the laws are
re-written,
Who’s left to fight for justice in Britain?
When the history books shut and the gravestones
are written,
Will you have fought for justice in Britain?’
Trevor Suthers, then a postgraduate student, wrote a play about
Steven Shaw’s experiences, which the student Umbrella Theatre
Company rejected on artistic grounds in 1987. Revised, adapted and
thinly disguised, with the Shaw character named Peter Avon and the
poll tax revolt as background, it was performed at the Green Room
five years later under the title Conspiracy to Pervert (the author was
now a scriptwriter for Coronation Street). On 7 October 1987 the
Union agreed that the new Union building, then in the offing but not
yet in being, should be named the Steven Shaw Building. In 1990,
when the building was in use as a nightclub, the Union Council agreed
that it should indeed be called the Steven Shaw Building by way of a
sub-title, but should for commercial purposes continue to be known
as the Academy.
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206 The 1980s
However, comparisons of Steven Shaw with ‘the Birmingham Six,
the Guildford Four and the Broadwater Farm Three’ savoured of
hyperbole. They provoked a mocking letter from ‘The Birchfields
Five’, who were bored with left-wingers’ tales of injustice. Their ques-
tion, ‘Steven who?’, perhaps reflected a shift to the Right, or towards
a lower degree of political awareness and a more hedonistic outlook,
on the part of students in general. ‘Students that go to the Academy’,
they argued, ‘do not do so to hold earnest debate on the subject of
whether the Steven Shaw case should merit a feature on Panorama.
They are there to drink, dance and enjoy a band.’
In November 1985 the Deputy Chief Constable, John Stalker, wrote
to the BBC rejecting the findings of the Platts-Mills inquiry and citing
recent events as proof that the University contained violent students. He
referred to the treatment of the Home Office Minister David Wadding-
ton, who had been expected to speak at the Union on the theme ‘That
no western country can get along without immigration control’.
Waddington entered and left the Union building without hindrance.
Police officers observed the proceedings but did not intervene. How-
ever, hecklers in the meeting hall almost drowned the Minister’s
remarks and the behaviour of about thirty students, which was uncouth
rather than violent – they threw paper missiles, spat at the speaker and
tried to grab the microphone – plunged the University back into public
disapproval. As convention demanded, Mr Waddington denounced his
tormentors with gusto as ‘left-wing fascists’; predicted that ‘however
loud you shout you will not be able to stop freedom of speech in
Britain’; and commented afterwards that ‘those students were not fit to
be educated at the country’s expense. They acted like pigs.’
Fearing for the University’s reputation, unable to blame the distur-
bance on outsiders, the Vice-Chancellor and the University Council for
the first time taxed the Union Executive with taking inadequate pre-
cautions and failing to apologise to the Minister (the Union took the
view that any apology should be made by the Federation of Conserva-
tive Students, who had invited him). The Council called for reports on
the affair and dismissed the first, like a tutor rejecting a feeble student
essay, as inadequate; the second, though an improvement, they found
unsatisfactory. They refused to accept the student officers’ claim that
‘attempts at disruption were dealt with speedily and effectively’. The
student officers contended that the Union’s own disciplinary proce-
dures ought to suffice, for these included ‘fines, reprimand, suspension
of membership and expulsion’, and the purported offences had taken
place on Union territory.
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The Students’ Union and the politicians 207
Council requested the Union officers to make the outcome of their
proceedings public, which they might not otherwise have done. But in
any case, as the Vice-Chancellor made clear, the University intended to
invoke its own Statute XXI. This legislation empowered the Senate to
establish a committee ‘for the purpose of investigating and hearing
cases of misconduct or breach of discipline’, and the University’s
action marked the most determined move in almost twenty years to
intervene in the Union’s affairs. In the background was Ordinance XIV,
which required every student to ‘maintain at all times and in all places
a standard of conduct and behaviour proper to academic life’. The
Senate disciplinary committee was chaired by a Pro-Vice-Chancellor,
A.A. Grant, the Professor of Restorative Dentistry, and consisted of
another five academics and a student, who was to be nominated by
the General Secretary of the Students’ Union. Donald Redford, the
Chairman of the University Council, proclaimed to the Court of
Governors in January 1986 that ‘Denial of free speech anywhere on
our campus is a threat to us all: gross incivility and mindless braying
must be banished forever.’
The establishment of the committee antagonised many students.
Conflict arose, not for the first time, between radicals who wanted an
immediate resort to direct action, and moderates (including Chris
Grant, the General Secretary of the Union) who saw the occupation
of the University offices as an ace to be played only when all other tac-
tics had failed, and a move to be undertaken only with the support of
other campus unions whose members would be affected. A General
Meeting voted, by the narrow margin of 128 votes to 124, to occupy
parts of the Main Building and the Beyer Building, and certain
students did so for five days, between 23 and 28 January 1986. The
University obtained a repossession order. The occupiers withdrew at
the behest of an Emergency General Meeting attended by 1,200 stu-
dents, at which the General Secretary argued that the Union should
occupy only in the unlikely event of the University expelling the
accused students. Chris Grant’s dilemma was so painful that he con-
templated resignation, saying in an open letter that he had ‘become
depressed by the undercurrent of values, attitudes and motives that
determine the mainstream political discourse of the Union’.
The Senate tribunal passed sentence on four students, including the
Conservative chairman of the meeting, who had compounded the dis-
order by kicking out at protesters in an attempt to protect the speaker.
They preferred suspensions to expulsions. This decision was not,
perhaps, a cunning move to confuse the situation, but an attempt to
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208 The 1980s
follow precedent. The University had last established a disciplinary
committee in 1968, when students disrupted a meeting (not arranged
by the Union) addressed by a Minister, Patrick Gordon Walker, and
the guilty parties had been suspended for the rest of the academical
year. In 1986, however, when general support for the culprits was
stronger and the issues more complex, it was soon being argued that
suspensions were tantamount to expulsions, for the students con-
cerned would probably be unable to obtain grants to resume their aca-
demic work. As though prepared at last to recognise the University’s
disciplinary system, the students lodged an appeal and some of them
retained the services of the Longsight solicitor Rhys Vaughan, who had
defended students involved in CND demonstrations and in the Brittan
affair. Another occupation followed on 11–14 February and ended in
an eviction. Academics began, meanwhile, to divide into hardliners
who wanted exemplary punishments imposed and softliners who
believed that the University was over-reacting and making too many
concessions to political expediency. One group accused the University
of failing to observe natural justice and improperly disciplining some
students for ‘extra-curricular activities’ whilst failing to defend others
(Sarah Hollis and Steven Shaw) against police harassment.
The chairmanship of the appeal tribunal was entrusted to Sir
George Kenyon, the former Chairman of the University Council, who
had considerable experience as chairman of a bench of magistrates.
He recognised the qualities of the defence advocate, ‘an experienced
campaigner in fighting for the rights of the weak, the oppressed and
the left-wingers who were so monstrously ill-used by society and by
those like me who always seemed to be appointed and not elected. My
main struggle was to demonstrate to him that it was a fair hearing
without, of course, making concessions.’ The appeal tribunal inclined
to leniency. Two suspensions were suspended in return for promises
of good behaviour and the students concerned were allowed to con-
tinue their courses; one student who, the defence argued, had
incurred guilt by association, saw his conviction quashed; the young
Conservative chairman of the meeting was fined and reprimanded. Sir
George conceded that Waddington had been ‘very provocative’.
Left-wingers hailed the decisions as a triumph for their own tactics.
Chris Grant pointed out, however, that the accused had neglected to
defend themselves properly in the first round of the proceedings and
that only when they consented to do so had a just result been achieved.
Some University critics murmured of appeasement, and a member of
the Estates and Services Department adapted Kipling to the occasion:
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